March 10, 2015

A common source of frustration and confusion among Link Emperor users new and old is determining exactly how to configure your Topics.

Good news: topics are actually very easy once you understand them. I am going to give you an overview of exactly how to use topics and then walk through a specific example for an ecommerce site.

First, a history lesson.

It used to be easy to rank one single page on your website for all sorts of different keywords, just so long as you built a boatload of links with all sorts of different anchor texts. You could even rank for stuff that was only barely related to the content on your page, so long as you had enough links.

For instance, we used to have a website that sold hotel room reservations. We could rank the exact same page for the keywords "MGM Grand Las Vegas" and "MGM Grand Las Vegas Swimming Pools" ...aaaaaaandddddd "MGM Grand Las Vegas Shows".

You can't really do that any more.

Why?

Because the content that a searcher would expect to find for the keyword "MGM Grand Las Vegas Swimming Pools" is quite different from the content they'd expect to find for keyword "MGM Grand Las Vegas Shows".

In the case of the former, the searcher would expect to learn about swimming pools and in the case of the latter, the searcher would expect to learn about shows.

Google is no longer willing to just send both of those searchers to a site that is just trying to sell them a hotel room. They expect us as webmasters to actually help the searcher learn what they need to learn.

So that brings us back to Topics.

Topics describe the information that searchers are looking for.

It's that simple.

Some topics will be general and some will be highly specific. You need to have both types represented.

Let's imagine we still had that site that sold hotel bookings. That site could be a campaign in Link Emperor called "Las Vegas Hotels".

Then for topics we want to have a general topic for each property that we sell. These should include "Tropicana Las Vegas", "MGM Grand Las Vegas", "Wynn Las Vegas", etc.

Then we also want to have as many specific topics as we can come up with. For each hotel, we want to have a topic for "Tropicana Las Vegas Pools", "Tropicana Las Vegas Shows", "Tropicana Las Vegas Slots", "Tropicana Las Vegas Parking", "Tropicana Las Vegas Meeting Rooms", etc.

Basically you want a topic for everything you could imagine writing an article or creating a video or releasing a press release about.

Common mistake alert: Don't limit yourself here to topics where you already have content. Go ahead and create ALL the topics for everything you can think of that might be a good source of traffic. We do not charge you for topics. It is perfectly fine to have topics without content. They'll serve as a blueprint for the content you need to develop in the future.

So what I'm really saying is that topics are the natural result of keyword research!

We do our keyword research using the Link Emperor Research tab (click here to learn more about it). But feel free to use as many research sources as you have available to you.

Seriously, you want to have a LOT of topics defined for each campaign. Use your imagination and come up with everything searchers might be looking for. I challenge you to come up with at least 25 topics for each campaign.

I hope that explains Topics. In a future post, I'll take you through how to define the settings within a Topic.